Free Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh Page A

tremendously. I hope we can go on with it some other night but at the moment I’m rather sleepy so if you don’t mind I think I’ll turn in.’
    He then rolled over and lay silent. Guy went to bed to the sound of Apthorpe’s breathing, turned off the lights and slept also. He woke in the dark to hear groaning and stumbling. He turned on the light. Apthorpe was on his feet blinking.
    ‘Good morning, Crouchback,’ he said with dignity. ‘I was just looking for, the latrines. Must have taken a wrong turning. Good night.’
    And he staggered from the room leaving the door ajar. Next morning when Guy was called, the batman said ‘Mr Apthorpe’s sick. He asked for you to go in and see him when you’re dressed.’
    Guy found him in bed with a japanned tin medicine chest on his knees.
    ‘I’m a bit off colour, today,’ he said. ‘Not quite the thing at all. I shan’t be getting up.’
    ‘Anything I can do?’
    ‘No, no, it’s just a touch of Bechuana tummy. I get it from time to time. I know just how to take it.’ He was stirring a whitish mixture with a glass rod. ‘The hell of it is I promised to lunch with the Captain-Commandant. I must make a signal putting him off.’
    ‘Why not just send him a note?’
    ‘That’s what I mean, old man. You always call it “making a signal” in the service, you know.’
    ‘Do you remember calling on me last night?’
    ‘Yes, of course. What an extraordinary question, old man. I’m not a talkative bloke as you well know, but I do enjoy a regular chinwag now and then in the right company. But I don’t feel so good today. It was bloody cold and wet on the links and I’m liable to this damned Bechuana tummy if I get a chill. I wondered if you could let me have some paper and an envelope. I’d better let the Captain-Commandant know in good time.’ He drank his mixture. ‘Be a good chap and put this down for me somewhere where I can reach it.’
    Guy lifted the medicine chest, which on inspection seemed to contain only bottles labelled ‘Poison’, put it on a table, and brought Apthorpe paper.
    ‘D’you suppose I ought to begin: “Sir, I have the honour”?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Just “Dear Colonel Green?’
    ‘Or “Dear Mrs Green”.’
    ‘That’s the ticket. That’s exactly the right note. Good for you, old man. “Dear Mrs Green” of course.’
     
    One of the characteristics of the Halberdiers was a tradition of firm churchmanship. Papistry and Dissent were almost unknown among the regulars. Long-service recruits were prepared for Confirmation by the chaplain as part of their elementary training. The parish church of the town was the garrison chapel. For Sunday Mattins the whole back of the nave was reserved for the Halberdiers who marched there from the barracks behind their band. After church the ladies of the garrison – wives, widows and daughters in whom the town abounded, whose lawns were mown by Halberdiers and whose joints of beef were illicitly purchased from the Halberdier stores – assembled with hymn books in their hands at the Officers’ House for an hour’s refreshment and gossip. Nowhere in England could there be found a survival of a Late-Victorian Sunday so complete and so unselfconscious, as at the Halberdier barracks.
    As the only Catholic officer Guy was in charge of the Catholic details. There were a dozen of them, all National Service men. He inspected them on the square and marched them to mass at the tin church in a side street. The priest was a recent graduate from Maynooth who had little enthusiasm for the Allied cause or for the English army, which he regarded merely as a provocation to immorality in the town. His sermon that morning was not positively offensive; there was nothing in it to make the basis of a complaint; but when he spoke of ‘this terrible time of doubt, danger and suffering in which we live,’ Guy stiffened. It was a time of glory and dedication.
    After mass, as the men were waiting to, fall in for their